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Saturday, March 22, 2014

High Society Grizzly

Sometimes I can't believe myself, but after a very difficult hour of working on the last iteration of this image, I decided to start over again. Hey, I heard the famous painter John Singer Sargent painted multiple versions of his subjects for portraits before he painted the final. Anyway, my last sketch was more of a 2d cartoony kind where I honestly didn't know how the anatomy was behaving. My instructor Chris Oatley told us not to worry much about character design for this assignment, but instead to worry more about painting technique. So I finally decided to listen and now I'm sticking with a single reference photo for the bear face. Oatley told us that we can paint anything that we can truly draw and understand. At work, I typically draw everything straight into Photoshop using my Wacom tablet. I was getting frustrated with that the other day with my bear, so today I used paper and pencil (whoa, what are these dark smudge marks on the bottom of my hand?) It was actually pretty relaxing. I did a few more bear sketches from photos and I also decided to do a 1 hour Sculpey sculpt so I could see how the light was hitting the face of the bear (now I realize why they sell fancy little toy animals in arts and crafts stores). I also found a higher resolution version of the Sargent painting with more accurate colors to the original. That helped a lot in getting the rest of the painting working the way it's supposed to. I just couldn't handle that noisy magenta from the last iteration. This painting is not done yet, but after 6.5 hours of work today, I feel like I'm finally getting my bearings;)